Animal’s Daily Venezuela News

Venezuela was once the most prosperous country in Latin America, but today almost 90% of its population lives in poverty. Venezuela’s economy is in shambles. Recently, Venezuela’s own government released a report showing that its annual inflation rate accelerated to a whopping 833,000% in October alone.

In practical terms, Venezuela’s misery means that it is not uncommon to see children rummaging through the garbage for food. And as basic medical supplies and medicine run dangerously low, newborns and the elderly die unattended in Venezuelan hospitals.

These heartbreaking scenes are difficult for anyone to bear, but for me, it’s personal. I know many Venezuelans who held out hope that this “21st Century” form of socialism would turn out better than the 20th century version, but their dreams were quickly dashed.

Chavez may have died in 2013, but his ideas live on through his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro. Today, Maduro rules Venezuela with an iron grip, fighting the growing opposition as more and more Venezuelans are realizing that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was right when she said the trouble with socialist governments is that they eventually “run out of other people’s money.”

Scores of people who dared to speak up against the government have been killed or imprisoned. Political dissidents have been subjected to brutality, torture, and constant persecution.

Feature, not bug.

Plenty of those on the political Left here will claim that this isn’t “real” socialism, that socialism will work if we only put the right Top Men in charge. You need only look to the daffy old Socialist from Vermont, with his seven-figure net worth and three spacious estates, to see what political leaders look like under the supposed egalitarian vision of socialism.

Out on a limb.

Because socialism always ends up this way. Every. Single. Time. Folks like to point to the heavily-socialized Scandinavian nations as an example of “…see, socialism can work,” without mentioning that those nations’ economies are propped up by extraction revenues and, further, that their corporate taxation and regulation policies don’t much resemble socialism in the least. And, yet, even with those things in place, their native populations are cratering, with only massive Third World immigration keeping them active.

But the argument that gets left on the table is this: Socialism is incompatible with liberty. That alone is reason enough to oppose it.